Description
Newport, Minnesota is a community busy with the industries of steel-making, waste-hauling, and trucking, and stepping into Tinucci's Deli feels like going back 52-years, when the family first got into the food business. There's a counter full of ready-to-eat old school, home-style, Midwestern cooking: chicken and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and pasta and iceberg lettuce salads. It is a spread to feed those who do physical work, so the clientele is heavy on the overall-clad. Tinucci's food--choice of meat and two sides for less than $10--is often scooped by gray-haired ladies with friendly smiles--and the deli is the kind of place where a regular might still cash a check. So after the restaurant made headlines in 2010 when wayward Viking's wide receiver Randy Moss famously dissed Tinucci's post-practice buffet, Minnesotans cried foul. They know that Tinucci's cooks the way Midwesterners do when they serve a large volume for a low price and that the result is about the same as the spreads found at family reunions, church picnics, and funerals: the chicken's a little dry, the meatloaf's bland, the melon in the fruit cup is under-ripe, and the mixed vegetables are cooked within an inch of their lives. But that doesn't mean you insult it. Yes, Randy, the food is not fancy, but that's the genre. Wake up and smell the watered-down coffee.
